by Various
The birds captured his attention the most—eyes wild, wings outstretched.
After a time, a soft grinding rhythm returned to the world. Approaching footsteps.
Neil squinted into the sunlight above Greenwich Station. A man with a grey cap and greyer beard walked toward him, shoulder slumped at the weight of the black valise that hung in his hand like a dark fruit.
Neil froze as the old man circled the birds and started up the station steps. His grey eyes didn’t glance down at him. The man paused next to Miss Dutton, captured by the way her glare had frozen as if to stare right at him. He touched Miss Dutton’s hand almost reverently.
“Won’t be a minute,” he said to her with a graveled voice. “Two at most—two minutes lost.”
Neil scrambled backward, as far as his pinned fingers allowed.
The old man gasped and dropped his valise. “Did, did you… say something?” asked the old man.
“No,” said Neil.
“By grace,” said the old man, stepping back. “I’ve never seen a person fall out before.”
“Are you here to take me away?” Neil asked in a small voice. “Did I make the world stop?”
“No,” said the old man. “I didn’t come to take you, and you didn’t break the world. It’s been doing that well enough on its own.” The old man doffed his cap with trembling fingers. “I am here to fix it.”
“Oh,” said Neil, relieved that whatever had broken, he had not been the one to cause it.
“The question,” said the old man, “is why you’re here. The World Clock must have called you for a reason—”
“Can you help?” interrupted Neil as he yanked his arm against Mrs. Dutton’s stony grip. His fingers were starting to feel as if they were filled with angry insects.
The old man blinked. “No boy, stay with your mother here,” he said as he reached for his valise. “I must discover what purpose—”
“She’s not my mother,” said Neil with such quiet force that the old man sputtered. “She’s from the wretched Foundling Hospital.” Neil yanked his body against the woman’s stone grip with all his strength. With a gasp, he stumbled free, clutching his reddening fist to his chest.
Neil made a grab for Miss Dutton’s other hand which, she had raised triumphantly as if bearing a prize.
“What are you doing?” said the man.
“Going home,” said Neil struggling to reclaim what lay in her palm. His voice was edged with anger, or something more fragile. “If home is still there. They took father’s watch-making tools and put our things in the street.”
“Your things? Where is your family?”
“It was just father and me.”
“Where is your father?”
“Gone.” Neil released his grip, revealing the outline of the pitted gold watch that still lay in Miss Dutton’s grasp. “This was his.”
The old man bent over the boy. “That looks like a fine timepiece,” he said, studying not the watch, but Neil’s watering eyes. “My own father was a clockmaker that designed such beautiful things. He raised me himself before he passed and left me to continue his… Yes, a fine timepiece. May I?” He reached out to touch it.
Neil shielded it from the old man, gripped it and yanked. Not even the gold chain that draped from Miss Dutton’s hand would flex.
“It hasn’t fallen out of time like you have,” said the old man. “I’m afraid there’s no moving it as long as time is stopped.”
Neil let go completely, revealing a ring of black numbers on the smudged white face. The watch had no hands.
“I took it apart.” Neil said, glancing down at the cobblestones. “I couldn’t put all the pieces back.”
The old man touched his shoulder. “These things can be fixed,” he said, a smile hidden in the grey of his beard, “especially if one learns how. I’ll show you how to put it right as soon as we can. You were your father’s apprentice?”
“I was supposed to be,” Neil said hesitantly.
“My father taught me that all things that fall out of time serve the World Clock. Come,” said the old man as he picked up his valise, “I’ve something to show you.”
“Where?” asked Neil, not wanting to leave the watch behind.
“Right here,” the old man said moving toward the platform. “Time’s breaking down in many places. This is one of them“
“Why?”
The old man turned. “If I knew that, the world wouldn’t be ending.”
• • •
The huge black engine had been pulling into the platform when time ceased. Great gouts of smoke and spark hung motionless around its oil-stained face, as if it were a mist-shrouded dragon with an all-seeing yellow eye. Neil liked trains but the blind stare of this one unsettled him, and he knew it must be the one Miss Dutton intended to put him on.
The old man paused in the middle of the platform before the engine. Neil stopped five paces away.
“Do you have a name?” the man asked.
“Neil,” said the boy, sweeping his hair from his eyes.
“Are you very good at fixing things Neil?” the man said, pausing to examine the boy.
“I’m good at taking them apart.”
“Well, Master Neil, my name is Mister Harrison, and my father taught me how all things fit together.” He reached into his collar and drew out a long black clock-winding key. It was larger than any key that Neil had ever seen. The only part that gleamed was a gold pinion gear, set into the head like a precious stone.
“What is it?” asked Neil.
“The key to nearly everything,” said the old man with a smile. “Your key.”
“But I don’t want that. I just want my father’s watch.”
“Boy, forget that for a moment. You are no mere object fallen from time. You are meant to know its very movements and secrets. You must be the apprentice for whom the key and I have searched for so long.”
“That’s not possible,” whispered Neil, yet his pulse quickened.
“Not possible—does any of this seem possible?” said Mister Harrison waving the key at the silent world. “The World Clock is breaking down. I need an apprentice to learn its secrets and keep it running. Impossible things are what you must be trained to do.”
“My father tried to teach me…” He could remember his father’s hands guiding his into the belly of a grandfather clock, until it came crashing to pieces on the workshop floor. “It’s just that I’m not very good at it.”
“Nonsense. You just need to have faith in yourself.”
Mister Harrison draped the key into Neil’s outstretched palms. “Grip it tightly now, both hands.”
Neil squeezed the black metal, afraid to drop it. His skin began to itch against it and after one unbearable moment he opened his hands again, certain the key had become something else. It was still a key.
“Strange,” said the old man, his voice drawn into a whisper.
Mister Harrison reached to take it. The moment the old man’s fingers touched it, an orange glow traced through the black metal like the heart of a burning ember.
“The key should have wakened when you touched it. Perhaps…” The old man pressed the key back into Neil’s hand. It glimmered with fire, but when Mister Harrison drew his fingers away, it went black as a lump of coal.
“Well, you must have been called here for a reason. What else can you do?”
“I can whistle real loud,” said Neil haltingly. “I can cook. My dad always said I was good with animals.”
“No, no, no. You must do something.” The old man reached out a bony fingertip and poked him in the chest, as if testing to see if he turned into something the key had not.
“Do… Do I still get to be your apprentice?”
Mister Harrison gazed at Neil carefully, as if he was peering through a jeweler’s loupe. “The clock needs a keeper more than anything. I can think of no other reason it could have called you. Unless the reason you fell out of time is that the breakage is far worse tha
n I feared.”
Mister Harrison held the key out before him like a dowsing rod and searched the air. The black metal began to glimmer as he pointed it beyond the edge of the platform.
The great grease-streaked engine bore down on the empty spot, its dark lines blurred faintly as if still in motion. Two polished rails stretched across the black gravel before it.
“Are you going down there?”
The old man stared at the spot for a moment, glancing at the train. “It’s not for us to choose where the key opens. It knows where the breakage is.” Mister Harrison, gathered his valise and lowered it down to the tracks to use as a step.
Neil hesitated at the edge, then jumped down.
Mister Harrison was already testing the air with the key. He seemed to carve at a spot until he twisted the key into the air itself. Neil heard a click.
The air turned dirty, stretched open, and peeled back like a scab. Neil stepped closer, looking into the dark, hollow wound.
Gleaming treasure filled the portal. Gears, pinions and bridge plates of shining gold and silver, some large enough for a man to leap through the gaps. Neil gasped when he saw golden salamanders clinging to the spokes of the closest gears. The salamanders were the spokes, he realized, their noses touching the hub in irregular symmetry. He touched one whose head seemed craned to look right at him. It was part of the machine. A tremendous ticking echoed in the darkness, but the clockwork did not turn, merely twitched with each cavernous beat.
“Why does the sequence look like a lizard?” asked Neil.
“Good eye. These parts of the World Clock are called the complications,” the old man said proudly. “These are just a few of the natural cycles influenced by time: seasons, migrations, tides. This one determines the mating season of fire salamanders,” Mister Harrison said, tapping the gear Neil had touched. He pointed to another one back in the shadows that looked like a flock of birds wheeling round the edge of a silver gear. “And that one over there influences the migration of terns.”
The old man crouched and opened his leather case. A black pigeon poked its head up from where it had been roosting in a nest of iron tools between a red wooden top and a constable’s truncheon. Its feathers were so black, they shimmered like an oil-slick rainbow.
“What are you doing in here?” The boy gasped as he reached for the cooing bird, but the old man waved him back.
“Old Jack’s not a toy.” He picked up the placid bird and set it in the upturned lid where it began to preen one wing.
“Well, this thing is,” said Neil in a low voice. He picked up the top with the flecking red paint.
“That may be what it was,” said the old man, reaching out—not to take it, but to hold it still in Neil’s hands, “but when something falls out of time, it always becomes something more. Try giving it a little spin. Go on.”
Neil took the top in both hands and put it on one of the wooden sleepers that lay under the tracks. The string meant to spin the top had worn away to a cotton nub.
“Careful now,” said the old man.
With the first hint of a smile, Neil gave it a fierce spin with his hands.
Neil felt the whole world launch into movement around him. Though he’d been on his knees an instant before, he found himself sliding backward, arms splayed. Mister Harrison was yelling, his hat tumbling down the tracks, but Neil’s focus remained fixed on the top.
It seemed to stand perfectly still on its point while the whole world spun around it with the dizzy outward pull of a merry-go-round. The vertigo slowed and the toy toppled over and rattled in place.
“What was that?” said Neil with the first real smile he’d felt in a long time. The pigeon landed atop the hooded eye of the train engine.
“That,” said the old man flat on his back, “was much harder than you needed to spin it!” The old man scowled at Neil. “What possessed you boy? You could break something.”
Neil glanced away and jammed his hands in his pockets. “You made the top?” he asked in a low voice.
“No,” said the old man, “My father found it a long time ago, in Denmark, when he was fixing the Baltic Sea current. It’s a particularly useful tool for finding things that have fallen out of time.” The old man righted the top and spun at it very gently. The tug came again and the constable’s truncheon that had fallen between the rails rolled slowly into the gravel.
“You mean things like me?”
“Well, not precisely,” said Mister Harrison. “You’re no mere tool that’s fallen out of time.”
“Is the bird a tool? What can it do?”
“Other than eat far more than it should, nothing I’ve yet found. Come down here, Jack!” Mister Harrison waved at the black pigeon roosting on the headlamp. It turned its back to him. “Blasted bird. Come down here!”
Neil let out a warbling whistle and held out his hands. The bird cocked its head at him and fluttered down to the tracks. Neil herded it into his hands and looked into its red-rimmed eyes. He could feel its tiny heart racing.
“How did you do that?” asked Mister Harrison.
“We had a loft of racing pigeons. Father always said I was good with living things.”
“There’s not much alive in the World Clock that you’d want to meet,” said Mister Harrison. He reached down and dug through the jumbled motley in the valise, drawing a tarnished silver spyglass from beneath a yellow candle stub. He leaned into the hole and peered through the intricate clockwork.
“Strange,” whispered Mister Harrison. The hand holding the spyglass trembled.
“What is it?”
“Stay here,” he said. He closed and hoisted the valise up into the gears and shoved it inward.
“But—”
“Mind the portal.” With a groan, the old man dragged himself up and into the darkness.
Neil listened at the opening and heard nothing but that hollow heartbeat tick. It seemed to echo out into the world around him. When he turned and saw the towering black face of the engine, he stumbled back, wondering if it hadn’t crept closer when he wasn’t looking.
Neil walked up to it tentatively and stood beneath its hooded eye. He cupped the bird in one hand and held the other out, almost touching the long rusted scratches that whiskered the steel face.
Jack let out a shrill cry, flapping against Neil’s chest. He felt that if he let himself touch the black metal, he would freeze before that eye until time woke and bore him under. He stumbled back.
“Your name’s Jack then?” said Neil. His voice sounded too loud in the still world. “Do you have something special you can do?”
The bird cocked its head at him.
“It’s ok. I don’t know what I’m good for either.”
A shout echoed from behind him. The old man. Neil ran over to the portal, craning his neck to hear. “Mister Harrison?”
Neil peered into the darkness, listening, but all was as still as the world outside.
“Mister—”
A hammer-strike of metal on metal rang through Neil’s head as it echoed from the portal. Jack burst from Neil’s hands at the clang, as wide-eyed as the birds out front. He flapped wildly against the edge of the dark portal and flew in.
“Wait!” cried Neil. Throwing one last glance at the train engine, he leapt for the edge of the hole and yanked himself over the gears.
He cried out as he slipped forward, one hand stretched over the edge of a pit just large enough to swallow him whole. He could not see the bottom but he could hear the echo of his yell for a long time.
“Boy, what are you doing?” asked the old man as he ducked from beneath a gear, the constable’s truncheon clutched in his hand.
Neil stood carefully. “There was a terrible noise. Jack flew into the portal.”
Mister Harrison glanced up. “Never mind that old cock, I never did find a use for him. Go back and mind the entrance.”
“Please,” said Neil throwing a glance at the black engine, “I don’t want to be alone.”
/> The old man hesitated, “This part of the World Clock is delicate but it’s true that I must begin your training if you are to be any kind of apprentice at all. You must stay close, and don’t touch anything unless I say so.” Mister Harrison ducked back under the hanging gears and into the shadows.
Neil glanced up again, but Jack was nowhere to be seen. He hurried after, almost stumbling in the darkness. He reached for the old man, but Neil’s fingers brushed a startling coldness.
With a hiss, the shadows before him erupted with a sickly green light. Neil let loose a shriek.
“Don’t be afraid,” came Mister Harrison’s voice from behind him. “It’s just an embalming globe. The light preserves our work.”
Neil blinked. The radiance he shielded his eyes against was more painful than illuminating. He saw a greenish globe bolted like a street lamp above a dark piece of machinery. The metal of this clockwork box was black and greasy. No fanciful animals graced the surface, only stains. Mister Harrison stepped into the light.
“What is it?” asked Neil. He leaned down to touch the rough, pitted surface. It made the tip of his fingers itch.
“Never mind. It’s just another complication,” said the old man. “Come, and stay close to me this time.”
“Why does it look different?”
“Because it’s an improvement,” the old man said, his voice tight. “That is my father’s fine work, if I’m not mistaken. It takes Atlantic storms and points them safely at the new world.”
Neil saw another black mechanism close by it. He waved his hand at it cautiously. Another teakettle hiss and the globe above it revealed a squat collection of black iron cogs with a crude decoration of a frog on top. The frog was missing its head.
“That’s an old one, before my time,” said the old man, “Keeps the amphibians in the river Thames from making such a damnable racket. Doesn’t always work properly. Sometimes it makes them rain.”
“What’s wrong with frogs singing?” asked Neil, and he realized he’d never heard frogs in city before.
“Never mind that, boy,” said the old man, drawing him forward into a space just beyond the portal. “We must focus. If there is any heart of this clock that is precious, it is the one above us.”